“It’s kind of like when we first discovered Phage. So much discovery and activity,” Goreth said to Erik and the Audreys nearly a week later. “Only, this time, we’re adults and don’t really have the energy or time to deal with all the excitement. But at least we’re not living with our parents while it’s happening. Peter and Abigail are as understanding as they can be. We’re so lucky.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Erik asked.

“Invite more of them in,” Sarah replied.

“Really?” Erik asked.

Sarah and Goreth sighed simultaneously, and it was cute, but there was no way for Erik or the Audreys to know that. Sarah answered, “Yeah. Phage convinced me that it can bring real help aboard, and that we all might be surprised by the expertise that can be brought to bear on our disabilities and paperwork. And also, maybe our goals for writing a book.”

“That this is happening just as our chronic illness, or whatever it is, has been flaring up the worst it’s ever been isn’t a coincidence, apparently,” Goreth added.

The Audreys looked up from their cup of drip, and asked, “What about finding that lost tech? The Tunnel Apparatus?” It sounded like Shelley talking, maybe.

“Hm,” Goreth intoned, then slid aside to let Phage come forward.

“I’ve told you that it is buried deep in a mountain,” it rumbled. “It will take a lot of work and resources to get to it. Resources that I don’t think any of us can afford. And it is better to leave it there.”

Erik shook his head, and said, “No, Phage, Ashwin told us that, and not in that much detail.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to,” it said.

“Yeah, I get that,” Erik replied. “It’s OK.”

The Audreys looked really bummed by Phage’s words, though, and Phage looked over at them and frowned. “I am trying to arrange other amazing things to show you,” it said. “But if it is that important for you to see Ktletaccete technology, we can make it a long term goal, I think. It might end up being disruptive to your planet’s cultures, though.”

“Our planet’s cultures need to be disrupted,” Erik insisted.

“What would happen if one of your governments get this power?” Phage asked. “I have been on your planet for twenty of your years now, and I do not like what I see.”

Erik held up his hands and said, “I get you. But.” He switched to holding up one finger. “I think they’ll probably eventually find it and take advantage of it, if we don’t get there first. And I’m nervous about letting it just sit there in the meantime.”

Sarah felt the need to interject. “I’m not against looking for it, Erik,” she said. “But it is a huge distraction from our survival right now. I’ve really, really got to get my disability shit straightened out, or I’m going to lose my Medicaid – our Medicaid – and it doesn’t make any sense that I’ve go to do that, but we’re fucked if that happens. We might have to move back up to Washington somehow, at the very least, just to get hormones covered.”

“What?” Erik was taken aback, incredulous.

“That letter we got. To renew our Medicaid and SNAP? That was the requirement.”

“It’s true,” Goreth added.

“OK,” Erik said. “That’s really fucked up. But the Audreys and I don’t want to lose sight of that tech, either, though. Your survival is priority number zero, right? Post haste. But, I want this to be next, personally. I’m excited about it.”

Audrey nodded solemnly.

“We can tell,” Sarah said, smiling.

“So, how are you doing with that government bullshit?” Erik asked. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

“I have no idea how there could be,” Sarah frowned. “It’s all stuff we need to manage and sign off on ourselves.”

“Maybe we can help organize the paperwork or something?” Erik suggested, looking at the Audreys. “Do some research for you?”

“Why focus on our personal life, Erik?” Sarah asked. “Isn’t there stuff going on with you that we could help with, somehow?”

Erik’s eyes got really wide and he leaned back in his chair, then shook his head, “You really don’t wanna know.” He pointed at the middle of the table, “This.” Then he watched the rest of us for a moment, before explaining, “OK. Like I said before, it’s probably against my ancestors’ wisdom to go poking into where that technology is buried. But, I gotta say. It is an important distraction for me to help you sort all of this out. It makes me feel like I’m part of a community, you know? And doing something useful. And I really need that right now. And fuckin’. Look. I don’t ever know for sure if whatever I’m looking at, or even touching, is real to anybody else. And I’m thinking that if I see and touch a piece of real alien technology that you’re touching and seeing, too, that’s… It’s gonna make me cry. And I could use a cry, you know? A good one. Not a shitty one. And that would be a good one.”

“Hmmmm,” Phage growled.

“And if we can find a way to destroy it before anybody else gets their hands on it, so much the better,” Erik added. “We could save the world that way, I think.”

“Got it,” Sarah said.

“So, your disability?” Erik prompted. “Maybe we could help somehow?” He gestured at himself and the Audreys.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Shelley of the Audreys said.

“Hold on,” Erik nearly cut them off, holding a hand up and closing his eyes. He recomposed himself. “I’ve gotta be vulnerable with you all for a second, OK? Is that OK? Because, you’re right, Sarah, I really do need some me time here, and some real understanding between us.”

The Audreys looked a little shocked at the sudden shift in Erik’s demeanor and subject matter, but nodded.

We all nodded as well, and Goreth said, “Please. You’re our friend. Go ahead.”

Erik put his hand on the table and said, “Now, I want you to know that y’all aren’t my only source of community. I didn’t want to imply that. I’ve got all sorts of shit going on. I’ve got multiple peoples that are mine, right? When I’m not here with you, I’m with family, or I’m with fam. Got it? That’s just how it is, and what I need. And you’re probably kind of the same.”

We all nodded, to show we were at least listening, but it was clear to me that Sarah and Goreth didn’t have that many social groups for support. Still, it was obvious that what Erik was saying was important for us understanding him, so that was an irrelevant point.

“Now,” Erik said. “I be masking, always.” He looked around at us, and repeated, “Always.”

There was enough of a pause, because maybe he was waiting for acknowledgement he’d said that, so Goreth filled it in with the question, “You’re talking about code switching, right?”

“Yes,” Erik said. “That’s one word for it. But to me, it’s masking. It takes the toll of masking, you know? Around family, it’s my autism, my plurality, and my genders. Around the fam, it’s all my disabilities, and my hallucinations especially. They get it, but they don’t get it. And around you, it’s my language and a whole bunch of other shit I’ve either already hashed out with you or don’t need to get into it with you right now, but I know you’re a bunch of fellow autistics with hyped up mirror neurons, and I just don’t want you imitating me and sounding like fools. You feel? Don’t say you feel. Please. Just nod or something.”

We nodded.

“So, I really need to make my rounds,” he said. “I go from group to group over the week, so that I can unmask part of myself for a while, and get some relief there, so that I can mask that particular shit when I’m around others. Or, God forbid, when I encounter the sparkle-pork, you know?”

I wanted to say I understood what he was saying. It made sense to me. But, also, this was so far from my own cultural understanding of anything, I felt it wasn’t my place to talk at all. I also had no idea what the sparkle-pork was. So I waited for someone else to speak up.

Less time passed than it felt like it did.

Goreth moved and said, “I think I understand that. Your words make sense to me. And I definitely get masking and not masking. But, I admit, around you, I don’t feel like we have to mask anything at all. Even here, at this place. Which is a huge relief and I’m so thankful for it.”

“And I don’t get that relief,” Erik said.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything we can do more to help?” Goreth asked.

Erik smiled wanly, “Just continue being your awesome, but adorably mediocre selves, OK? Like you do. And let me handle me. And state your boundaries clearly, like Sarah did a bit ago. That’s great. And let me state mine. Like we’ve all been doing this whole time we’ve known each other. I just.” He got stuck on that last word, thinking about what he was saying, apparently. “I think I’m going around venting at everyone, and redrawing boundaries. I think that’s what I need to do right now. And you letting me do it is a big help. Thank you.”

“I think you’re being too gentle with us,” Goreth ventured.

Erik smiled more broadly and shook his head, “Let’s not get into that discussion right now, OK? This was good. Thank you. Let’s move on.”

I want to say, as Ashwin to you, the reader, that even though the Sunspot is much smaller than your world, physically, we do have cultures. They are really, really different from yours. We have the Tutors, the Monsters, the Children, the Ancestors, and the Founding Crew, for broad strokes. And the social and practical pressures on those groups of people are really different from anything you’ll find on Earth, I think. And of course they are, because we’re alien to you. But also, there are so many Ancestors, for instance, that they can be broken up into a myriad of their own cultures, each one tracing its origins back to an era of the Sunspot’s history.

And maybe, someday, we can find a way to describe some of it in greater detail for you.

But I’m pointing this out to you because, when I start describing what life was like on the Sunspot for me, it’s going to sound like there maybe wasn’t a lot of conflict and social strife. At least not as much as what I’m starting to see around Earth. But it’s not a utopia by any stretch, and there is conflict and misunderstanding there, and a lot of clashes between the different cultures. Power struggles, even. And it took us a long time to root a lot of it out and to try to figure out how to smooth the worst of it over.

And we Pembers were kind of in the middle of some of that. And I’ve lived long enough to have a few of your lifetimes of experience.

So, I think I know when to take a step back and let someone talk about what they are experiencing culturally, even amongst people who are extremely alien to me.

But also, Sarah and Goreth have known Erik for over ten years now, or more, and their reactions also informed mine. And so did Phage’s, but it can be like a black hole influencing everything, a lot of the time, anyway.

And I also have to acknowledge that Sarah and Goreth’s own cultural perspectives influence my take on your world now, so I’m going to misstep there occasionally in the same way that they might.

Just watching and listening to Erik talk was absolutely my place in that whole discussion. Not to speak up.

Anyway, though, this prompted me to consider something else important.

Not only were we talking about the ramifications of real, tangible, physical Ktletaccete technology falling into the hands of human beings, who might then be able to examine it and figure out how it works.

We were also now talking very seriously about bringing more of us Ktletaccete over here to interact with your world, face to face, through Sarah and Goreth. And Goreth has already been exposing some of you to my accounts of our cultures.

And that could have ramifications as real and tangible as the physical Ktletaccete technology that Erik and the Audreys wanted to dig up.

Especially if Phage was serious about letting some of my siblings and peers help to dig that up, or to help Sarah and Goreth with their health problems.

It seemed that both Goreth and I suspected Phage had started this whole endeavor now, by allowing me to come over, because of Sarah and Goreth’s health problems. The nanites were absolutely the primary concern. But since Phage had entangled the Tunnel in their psyche, the health of their vessel was now an obstacle to dealing with that dangerous technology.

And right then, while they were having that discussion, I was thinking that it was an uncharacteristically audacious and risky move on Phage’s part to influence the technological and cultural development of an entire planet of people just for the sake of one human body. Even if the two people who lived in it were worthwhile people.

Why are you doing this, Phage? I asked.

I got in over my head, it replied, using an English idiom that Sarah and Goreth’s brain supplied the meaning for.

That made sense to me. I could imagine swimming in water that was too deep, and getting tired, and finding that being unable to reach the bottom would be trouble. Especially with my fur all wet.

If I got the meaning of that idiom, it’s likely that Sarah and/or Goreth overheard that little exchange, too.

Which is OK.

They deserved Phage’s admission.

Now what? I asked.

We follow their lead.

—

Sarah had made Goreth bring drawing supplies.

We’d all moved on to a big pot of tea that we could refill a couple times, and croissants. It looked like we were settling into Aunti Zero’s for a couple more hours of socializing, which suited me just fine.

Watching my hosts spend time with their friends, and relax while doing so, was just pure pleasure.

But then, Sarah said, “OK, Ashwin. Let’s draw that map!”

“Map?” Erik asked.

Shelley was already drawing a self portrait in their sketchbook, and not paying a lot of attention to the discussions going on. But at the mention of a map, they looked right up, full of interest.

Sarah put on a conspiratorial expression, lowering her head, hunching her shoulders, and smiling. “Yeah.”

“What of?” Erik prompted. It was clear he was hoping it was a map to where the Tunnel Apparatus was.

“The interior of the Sunspot,” Sarah whispered.

“Oh, really?” Shelley asked, even more interested. “Is this going to be an expansion of your inworld?”

Sarah held up both index fingers and said slowly, speeding the word up as she went, and cutting it off short at the end, “Nnnnnnno.”

Shelley shrugged, “Seems cool, though.”

“Really cool, actually. I hope,” Sarah said. “Ashwin has been showing us memories of what it looks like, but it looks like places we’ve seen here on Earth. Like it’s getting mixed up with our memories. And I want to see if they can draw a more accurate version if I let nem front with a pencil and a piece of paper.”

“Only, drawing isn’t my Art,” I interjected almost immediately.

Sarah looked over to our right, as if I was seated there, and said, “Everyone can draw. You can write your own name. I’ve seen it. That’s a drawing.”

I sighed internally.

“I’m going to try to pull you forward, Ashwin, and I’d like you to draw, however crappily you draw it, Tenmouth Sound and Katofar peninsula, OK? Just that part,” she said.

From memory? I shot back in thought.

“Your memory, yes,” she said. “Don’t you want to see if your memory is unmuddled by mine and Goreth’s? I think you should be able to look at what you draw and get an idea if it is or not, at least.”

Erik was smirking again.

“OK,” I said, taking the front. I looked at both Erik and Shelley before trying to figure out the best way to hold a pencil with a human hand.

There was the muscle memory, of course, as some people call it. It’s not really stored in the muscles, but the part of the brain that controls them, I’m told by Goreth. I think it works differently, on a neurological level, for us Ktletaccete. To call what we have “neurons” might even be wrong.

And, really, my original hand was not all that different from Sarah and Goreth’s, though the number of digits is off. And I don’t know what is more confusing to me, that difference, or the striking similarities.

But anyway, I overthought it, and fumbled the tool several times.

And then I made a scribble.

“I’m sorry, you two, but I need to waste some of this paper,” I said. “Warmups. Getting used to your arm. Getting used to this stylus. The paper is weird. I’m used to drawing on a tablet with a smoother surface.”

“I thought you said that drawing was not your art,” Shelley said softly.

“It isn’t,” I said, glancing at them. “But, I have had a lot of practice doing it anyway.”

“So you’re kind of a liar,” they said, with a kind looking human smile.

“No,” I said. “I’m saying ‘Art’ as a proper noun. It’s different than a common art.”

“What do you mean?” they asked.

“We believe that each Ktletaccete has a skill, a passion, that they have that they can do better than anything else,” I explained. “Not better than anybody else. We don’t really compare our skills with each other in that way. There really isn’t a point to doing that. But we each have a thing that just comes most naturally to us and brings us the most joy to do. Or. At least, that’s the theory.” I may have sounded a little glum with those last two sentences.

“So what’s your Art?” Shelley asked.

“I never found it,” I replied, moving the sheet full of scribbles aside, and then starting to brush the pencil side to side, on the side of its graphite, to see how it did broad, shading strokes. And as I proceeded to fill the page with that, I said, “Not everyone does.”

“So, maybe your Art is drawing,” they observed.

“It really isn’t,” I said.

“How do you know?” they asked.

“Because it doesn’t soothe me like I’ve seen Arts do for other people,” I replied. “It doesn’t feel like I’m my most true self when I’m doing it. I don’t feel like I’m one with the universe when I put stylus to tablet, or pencil to paper. I can tell. It’s not even happening right now.”

“That sounds like you’re describing a special interest,” Erik said.

“Oh?” I prompted him, pushing that shading warmup aside, and exposing the page I was going to draw the map on.

“Yeah,” he smiled. “You sound like you’re describing a whole species of autistic people. Like you’re all autistic, maybe, like us at this table.”

“I don’t actually know what that word truly means,” I said. “But I’m also not sure we can be called a species anymore.”

I started putting faint dots all over the page. At first, they were semi random, helping me to measure the paper and get my bearings, but then I started placing them more carefully at points where I knew I was going to draw prominent landmarks, aiming to get the proportions right. I erased any of the earlier marks that didn’t go to anything once it started to look like my memory of the morning sky back home.

I lived in a city named Frra. Which meant that when I looked up at the sky at the right time of the day or night, during clear weather, I could see Katofar Peninsula and Tenmouth Sound. The Sound had some cities in and around it. Not nearly as many as anywhere here on Earth. But they shined at night, and looked like tan colored circles in the purple forests during the day, faded nearly to blue by the atmospheric perspective.

Most of us could live Belowdecks, without marring the surface of the Garden, the landscape of wilderness where the flora and fauna of the Sunspot flourished. But we have a few clusters of surface dwellings we might as well call cities where people could live, too, for our psychological benefit.

I was explaining all of this as I continued to draw.

“You really look like a professional, doing that,” Shelley said.

“We don’t have the concept of professionals on the Sunspot,” I replied, mixing my borrowed linguistic knowledge with my memories of home to say anything coherent. I was surprising myself with my own words, but they were true.

“What do you mean by that?”

“No commerce. No business. No money. A professional is someone who does business, yes?” I asked.

Shelley and Erik nodded.

“No business, no professionals,” I reminded them. “We’re all…” I searched Sarah and Goreth’s brain for the right word. Or rather, I relaxed and tried to let it come to me, pausing in my drawing to do so, and finally said, “amateurs.”

And here I was, sharing my culture with Earthlings, entangling our futures even further.

“Sounds like the ideal of communism,” Erik said.

“I also don’t know what that is,” I replied, getting back to my drawing.

Making a map from memory isn’t really all that different from drawing a face from memory. It’s all shapes and forms. Conteurs. Some empty space, depending on how you look at things. Sarah’s helping me explain this. She’s also an artist of sorts and knows some of your local jargon about it.

But right then, she was also giving me the repeated thought, you’re better than me at this.

“Communism, as I understand it, is this socioeconomic model where the workers are supposed to own the means of production and get to decide what to do with it,” Erik said. “And sometimes that can look like not having any business or commerce, though usually it doesn’t. That’s why I said ‘ideal’. It’s some people’s ideal. I don’t know what I’d prefer, myself. I don’t know what would actually work. But,” and he gestured at the world around him, obviously indicating everything outside of the cafe as well as the cafe itself, “this definitely isn’t it.”

“Ah, hmm,” I said, starting to shade certain parts of the mountains and sea. I like to work on different parts of my drawings at different rates, finishing certain areas before even starting others, and keeping things going at different rates all around the page. It helps me think about the relationships between everything. But, while I was doing this, I thought about the huge changes in social structure on the Sunspot that had happened during my lifetime, and whether or not Erik’s description of communism could be applied to it at any time. “The means of production are really controlled by the construction nanites,” I said. “Which also happen to house most of the people, the Crew, in the Network. When a Child dies, they ascend through their neural terminal into the Network and become Crew. Which is what happened to me. But by the time I became Crew, that word meant something very different than what it meant when I hatched. And I think I’ve told you we use the word for Ancestor now, instead. I sometimes have trouble remembering which word to use, because that change in term happened near the end of my life.”

Erik was slowly shaking his head while he watched me draw and listened to me talk.

Audrey was perfectly still.

“Before I was given my neural terminal,” I said. “The Crew controlled the nanites completely, and none of us knew exactly who or what the Crew were, let alone that we might become Crew, or Ancestors, ourselves one day.”

“Ah, this sounds like it could be an epic Netflix series,” Erik said.

“History is like that,” I said, disregarding that I wasn’t sure what Netflix was. I could infer. “This is my history.”

“Please go on.”

“Well,” I said. “Even though my own system, the Pembers, were central to breaking the seclusion of the Crew and helped to convince the Crew Council to change how they did everything – and even though I lived through all of that upheaval until a new era of relative peace was created, and then we met our first alien civilization, I don’t know if any state of our culture could be called ‘communism’. Because I don’t know if any of our groups of people match yours, or if any of our social structures are similar enough. And also, because so much of our food and material production was just automated. Enough for everyone. Always. And nobody meddled with it, even in our darkest years.”

“Why not?” Erik asked. “It seems like if someone were to seize and control the food production, and decide who could eat or not, they could control the whole ship.”

“A couple of important reasons,” I said. “One. As amazingly big as the Sunspot is, it is a tiny, tiny world that is miraculously balanced and extremely fragile. Any disruption to that stability risks destroying the whole thing and just killing everyone on board. And, two. Phage was there.”

There was so much more I wasn’t telling them, but I really didn’t want to get into that part of our history yet. Or maybe ever. It might be something to leave to someone else.

“You can draw so well, and you’re really smart,” Shelley said.

“I’m over three hundred of my years old,” I said. “I have a lot of experience.”

“How old is that in Earth years?” Erik asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “We’ll have to sit down and try to figure out the math. I don’t even know if your smallest measurement of time is close to ours.”

Erik leaned forward, and asked, “Do your people have scientists, engineers, technicians? Experts in technology or knowledge about physics and the universe?”

“Those are Arts, so, yes,” I said.

“Are some of them going to visit?” he asked.

I slowly turned my face to look at his, studiously missing direct eye contact, and said, “I think that’s what Phage has in mind to help Sarah and Goreth.”

“That,” he said, “might be just as cool as the Tunnel Apparatus. Or cooler, even.”

“Or, more dangerous,” I said.

“Oh, shit,” he said very deliberately.

“Yes,” I replied, pushing the unfinished but very recognizable to me map toward the center of the table. “We’re going to have to be very cautious, I think.”

Shelley’s eyes widened.

Even though the map was technically unfinished, it did look like a deliberate and careful work of art to them. I’d left it that way on purpose, as a way of highlighting certain areas of it and de-emphasizing others, to make it more visually interesting.

I confess. This discussion I had with Erik and Shelley had convinced me to do something, and I’d been hoping that Sarah and Goreth wouldn’t notice. And that Phage would keep its mouth shut.

I had made the map to look more like Washington State, from Sarah and Goreth’s memories, than it should have looked.

I would later explain to them why, though. And the words “plausible deniability” were offered to me as a term for my explanation.

It was just a map. A work of art. Not really evidence of anything but a very active imagination. But, in combination with everything else we might be doing on this planet, it might start to look very real to some people.

If it looked like Earth geography, however, it would look like an obvious fake, and help discredit everything else we did as something clearly generated by a human mind influenced by human experiences, however subconsciously.

You’ll find that we still use this version of the map. We’re sticking to this plan.

That said, I had found that my memories could be disentangled from Sarah and Goreth’s if I focused on them while doing something like drawing a map. And that was important information for all of us. It might work for writing, if I really get into it, too.